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Volcanoes

It's no secret that volcanoes made Iceland. In fact they made most countries; but in geological terms Iceland is a newborn. In fact it isn't even properly born yet.

The north-western and eastern edges of the country may be reasonably old, but along the fault line, Iceland is still being born. Pulling apart at the speed of a growing fingernail, maybe Iceland will one day be the biggest country in the world?

Being pretty much the only landmass in the world sitting on a fault line which is pulling apart (as opposed to crashing together) is generally a good thing.

Mainly because it means our earthquakes are not very destructive. By way of illustration, at the time of writing there had been no fewer than 34 earthquakes in the last 48 hours, and none of them over three on the Richter scale. There are dozens of earthquakes every single day, and most of them are not even felt. We do have big ones sometimes though. Back in 2008, nearly 30 people were slightly hurt, including one broken leg. San Antonio it ain't!

Eyjafjallajökull.

The fault line does mean, on the other hand, that we have a lot of active volcanoes and an average of one eruption every two years in recent history. Most of them are small, short lived and cause relatively little transport chaos. But we all remember Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. That certainly was travel chaos.

The ironic thing is that Eyjafjallajökull was not a big eruption. There has even been a bigger one since then; but it didn't cause flight delays. Why not? Well, it has something to do with the size of the ash particles. As Eyjafjallajökull explosively erupted under thick glacier ice, its ash particles were small and sharp and travelled far and wide. Whereas usually the particles are bigger and fall back to earth more quickly, meaning planes can simply fly around the cloud.

Holuhraun eruption.

Despite the chaos, Eyjafjallajökull has proven a real tourist attraction and combination super jeep/hiking tours up the glacier to see the steaming hot rocks and decimated ice are extremely popular. And that's even without mentioning Þríhnjúkagígur – the volcano you can actually go inside of…

From its black sand beaches, to its eggy hot water, its constant earthquakes, and even its glaciers (which would not exist without nice high mountains to sit on), Iceland is volcanoes.

With that in mind, try to enjoy them. Like so many things in life, they are dangerous; but they are also essential. Heck, without volcanoes none of us would even be alive!